Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata Salazar (8 August 1879-10 April 1919) was a Mexican peasant revolutionary from Morelos who was one of the main figures of the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s.

Biography
Emiliano Zapata Salazar was born in Anenecuilco, Morelos, Mexico in 1879. In 1910, he organized an army of landless peasants from the poor state of Morelos, who were fighting to regain their lands lost to the large landowning estates under Porfirio Diaz. They joined the opposition of Francisco I. Madero and Pancho Villa against Diaz. However, when Diaz was toppled in 1911, Zapata continued his struggle against the attempts of the moderate Madero and his follower Venustiano Carranza to consolidate the achievements of the Mexican Revolution and to prevent it from challenging the social order. In the power vacuum created by the fall of the short-lived Victoriano Huerta dictatorship of 1913-1914, his troops entered Mexico City, where he was joined by Villa. He was forced by Carranza's constitutionalist troops to withdraw to the south, where he was killed by government troops under Jesus Guajardo in an ambush. A legend in his own time, his name was invoked in the Chiapas Rebellion by the EZLN.